In 2010, Google estimated that since the invention of printing, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. When writing systems were invented in ancient civilizations, approximately 6,000 years ago, words were not separated from each other (scriptural continua) and there was no punctuation and employed various media including tree bark, clay, stone, and metal. Texts were written from right to left, left to right, and even so that alternate lines read in opposite directions. Today, many languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese remain as right-to-left languages whereas those derived from the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic languages are left-to-right. Additionally Chinese and Japanese are read bottom-to-top whereas Hebrew, Arabic, and those derived from Greek, Latin and Cyrillic languages are top-to-bottom. Accordingly, even today there are multiple structures for text even ignoring the 82 languages with over 10 million native speakers and the 7,358 recognised languages (“Ethnologue: Languages of the World”).
Since the early-20th century to today the majority of books are printed by offset lithography although the introduction in the late-20th century, use computer-to-file and computer-to-plate systems further increased quality as well as allowing electronic distribution of content from a publisher to the printer. These technologies led to publishing concepts such as “print on demand”, which make it possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing much easier and more affordable whilst also allowing publishers to keep low-selling books in print rather than declaring them out of print. Also in the late 20th Century the combination of advanced word processing software, graphic image processing software, and standards for document exchange combined with the raid penetration of the Internet resulted in much of the new information generated not being printed in paper books but being available online through websites, digital libraries, CD/DVD/NAND ROM, or in the form of e-books. Additionally, the Internet has resulted in a rapid proliferation of information and written content overall despite erosion generally in writing skills of users of the Internet. An on-line book is an electronic book that is available online through the Internet whereas, at present, an e-book, being a contraction of “electronic book”, refers to a digital version of a conventional print book although with time these distinctions will be lost. Today the majority of content on the Internet is presented through extendable markup languages such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which control their appearance within webpages and websites.
Numerous e-book formats have emerged and proliferated over the past twenty years for electronic publishing (ePublishing), some supported by major software companies such as Adobe with its Portable Document Format (PDF) approach, and others supported by independent and open-source programmers including EPUB (also referred to as ePUB, ePub, EPub, and epub) which became an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in 2007 superseding the older Open e-book standard. Today the vast majority of downloadable content from the Internet is PDF based.
EPUB has become a leading format for e-books alongside PDF as it is free and open, supports re-flowable (word wrap) and re-sizable text, supports inline raster and vector images, allows embedded metadata, provides digital rights management (DRM) support, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) styling, alternative renditions in the same file, use of out-of-line and inline Extensible Markup Language (XML) islands (an XML island is a piece of XML embedded within an HTML document to associate data with an HTML object to extend the functionality of the HTML).
Like EPUB PDF is an open standard for document exchange. However, unlike EPUB, PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. It was officially released as an open standard in 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO 32000-1:2008. At the same time Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. Accordingly, PDF documents are fixed in layout and do not reflow according to the rendering device's screen dimensions or orientation as EPUB does. Other standards in addition to PDF and EPUB are also employed including, for example, the AZW and MOBI eBook formats.
In contrast to the fully self-contained PDF an EPUB file uses XHTML 1.1 to construct the content of a book. Styling and layout are performed using a subset of CSS 2.0 such that this specialized syntax requires only a portion of CSS properties to be supported by e-reading systems and adds a few custom properties such as page-header and page footer. EPUB also requires that PNG, JPEG, GIF, and SVG images be supported using Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and whilst other media types are allowed, creators must include alternative renditions using supported types. EPUB requires Unicode and content producers must use either UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding in order for EPUB to support international and multilingual books. However, reading systems are not required to provide the fonts necessary to display every Unicode character, though they are required to display at least a placeholder for characters that cannot be displayed fully.
To date e-book applications have been focused to only one aspect of the multi-faceted world of publishing, namely the replacement of physical books with an electronic book format. Accordingly it would be beneficial to provide users with an e-book software system that addressed the multiple facets of publishing that have evolved over the past two hundred years of publishing since steam-presses automated printing in conjunction with e-book software applications on their electronic devices. It would also be beneficial for the e-book software systems and/or software applications to leverage the benefits and potential that the Internet and high-speed communications provide including, but not limited to leveraging social media, supporting crowd sourcing, allowing streaming content, supporting multimedia content within annotations, and supporting hyperlinks within annotations.
Document Navigation:
Within the prior art navigating documents presented within webpages and applications has historically been accomplished through a scrollbar, usually appearing on one or two sides of the viewing area as long rectangular areas containing a bar (or thumb) that can be dragged along a trough (or track) to move the body of the document as well as two arrows on either end for precise adjustments. The “thumb” has different names in different environments, on the Macintosh it is called a “scroller”; on the Java platform it is called “thumb” or “knob”; Microsoft's .NET documentation refers to it as “scroll box” or “scroll thumb”; in other environments it is called “elevator”, “quint”, “puck”, “wiper” or “grip”. While dragging the thumb is historically the traditional way of manipulating a scrollbar, a scroll wheel may also be used, and optionally displayed arrow buttons may be clicked to scroll a small amount, or the trough above or below the thumb for a larger amount. The user may engage the scroll bar/thumb through a mouse on many electronic devices
In contrast electronic readers for displaying ePUB and PDF files are generally engaged today through a touch-screen on the tablet, electronic reader, etc or other electronic devices that the user is using wherein electronic reader software detects a lateral “swipe” (finger motion across the touch-screen) as indicating the user wishes to turn the page forwards or backwards. This has been considered acceptable to date as the majority of ePUB/PDF documents published are novels which, even if they are very long such as “War and Peace” are read sequentially by the user. However, user manuals, dictionaries, reference texts, statutes, periodicals, journals, magazines, and a wide range of other published materials whether text based or other media including audio, video, multimedia, computer generated imagery, etc. are accessed in a non-sequential manner in that the user wishes to progress to a specific element of the published material, search for an element of the published content or browse through it starting at an essentially pseudo-random point.
Accordingly, using an ePUB format for a 250 page text requires the user to execute 200 “swipes” to reach page 200 in the linear method of the prior art electronic reader software. Similarly, a user at page 400 requires 300 “swipes” to go backwards to page 100 where the electronic reader software remembers the user's last point in the text. However, a lawyer accessing a statute, a student accessing a reference text, or a mechanic accessing a manual will repeatedly access these documents at different points making navigation in such prior art means time consuming activities for the user. It would therefore be beneficial for a user to be able to rapidly shift their position within an item of published content using a user interface that supported individual page turns as well as small, moderate and large adjustments of position within the published content. It would be further beneficial for this user interface to support all these adjustments with a consistent user engagement rather than requiring the user to exploit multiple menus.
Indexing and Searching:
Within the prior art physically published content typically comprises a table of contents, the contents, and an index. This index comprises references to portions of the content and their location within the content. However, the terms in the index are selected by the publisher and represent only a portion of those within the content overall and may or may not represent actual elements of content. Within prior art electronic content published through EPUB the basic approach remains unchanged from the physical books it is intended to replace. In contrast other forms of electronic content such as Word documents, emails, and some PDF documents the content can be searched for any term through a search feature wherein the user types in the term or phrase they are seeking. However, every search requires that the content of the published content is searched again.
It would therefore be beneficial for any content released to be indexed completely once so that any term within the published content forms the basis for linking to a predetermined position within the published content wherein that term exists. It would be evident that beneficially such completely indexed published content would allow fast searching of published content and associated annotations where searching speed is now less dependent upon the size of the published content as it is not searched every time but once and subsequently a complete or substantial index of the published content and/or associated annotations is searched. Beneficially annotations may therefore be indexed separately and filtered prior to rendering search results. Additionally, the identification of multiple occurrences concurrently in the search allows alternative rendering of occurrences.
Fingerprinting and Encrypting:
Historically within the prior art copying published content required another individual to copy it physically with paper, ink, etc. Subsequently photography, offset lithography, and photocopying reduced the cost of copying wherein protection was primarily embodiment through watermarks within the original documents paper or the difficulties/cost of copying in significant quantities and same format. With electronic content that changed dramatically such that today published content is typically protected from copying by applying protection to the published content such as with PDF documents or is encrypted such as is employed in electronic content marketplaces such as Apple iTunes™ and Amazon AZW for example. However, such techniques are restrictive in respect of either being tied to a specific license and specific electronic device.
It would be beneficial for protection applied to published content to allow the license to be re-assigned to another user allowing enterprises to assign licenses to personnel and adjust as these personnel change or business requirements adjust or a user to purchase a license to published content and gift the published content to another. Neither instance is supported by the currently utilised digital rights management (DRM) techniques nor do such techniques allow for released published content to be traced subsequently upon identification of additional unlicensed copies so that the source of the original content can be identified. Obsolescence is normally an issue in electronic content from the user's viewpoint where DRM publishing systems are obsoleted through closure of enterprises providing them or electronic devices supporting them are unavailable. However, adjusting the publishing model of published content wherein publishers can publish multiple sequential releases of the content such that obsolescence is now a concern of those pirating the original published content as any release is obsoleted soon after its release.
It would also be beneficial for such e-book software systems and/or software applications to enable new paradigms that provide consumers, authors, publishers, retailers, and others with new models for releasing digital content from editorial and authorship viewpoints; new models for providing digital rights management; new models for publishers to release revised editions, errata, new additions, etc; new methods of engaging social networks within work and private environments with associated content (annotations) to the original release content; and supporting discussion and information dissemination within a wide variety of environments from education to business to book clubs etc. Within such e-book software systems and/or software applications the inventors consider primary (electronic) content as being content having defined authorship and released with or without digital rights, and secondary (electronic) content as being additional content associated with predefined elements of the primary content generated by one or more users with associated characteristics in terms of releasing the secondary content to one or more other users.
Accordingly the inventors have addressed providing benefits in terms of providing access to electronic content; supporting community interaction with electronic content; licensing electronic content with re-assignable rights and the ability to issue sub-rights; generating and rendering combined content from primary content and one or more secondary content sources with low network overhead; providing the ability to issue partial licenses to users with predetermined validity; and distributing electronic content with fingerprinting allowing unique identification of sources of non-authorised content. Additionally users address the navigation of e-books generically rather than the current dominant sectors of works of fiction and historical non-fiction such as biographies. Such works are read sequentially and accordingly easily rendered in a linear fashion to the user. However, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a user manual, a set of legal statutes, a cookery book are accessed in manners that may be described as non-linear or randomly by users such that different renditions of location and movement with the electronic content are required other than a table of contents, page numbers, and an index which mimic their historical paper predecessors or releases.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.